soren, and their three children: a three-year-old son and two young daughters who he takes to all of cal berkley's women's basketball games. it's one of the few breaks that lewis allowed himself over the past 18 months as he dug into the idiocy and negligence that produced the worst financial crisis since the great depression. >> i'm afraid that our culture will come to the conclusion-- 'cause it's always the easy conclusion--that everybody was just a bunch of criminals. i think the story is much more interesting than that. i think it's a story of mass delusion. >> lewis' forte has always been discovering little-known facts and characters that change people's perception about a story. so when he finally sat down at his computer with sacks full of research to write about this calamity, he had no interest in treasury secretary hank paulson or ben bernanke or the ceos of wall street's big investment banks, who he believes had no clue what was going on while it was going on. he wanted to tell the story through the eyes of people who were paying attention and who knew that a financial disaste